So You Think You Can Dance: Mary Murphy's Advice To Aspiring DancersThursday, November 06, 2008

FOX’s hit summer reality show, So You Think You Can Dance, is already casting for its 5th season and searching the country for the next crop of amazing dancers. The show makes its first stop in New York City next week, on November 13th, in Brooklyn. The show plans to announce more audition dates and cities in the coming weeks. Judge Mary Murphy currently has her hands full, judging the Canadian version of the show while casting for the upcoming U.S. season. This week, she spoke with The Province, a Canadian newspaper, about what she looks for in a winning dancer. No matter where you’re from, if you’re an aspiring dancer looking to try out for the show, you listen when Mary Murphy talks.

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Inevitably, when you hold an open casting call for anything, you won’t always get the best of the best. Horrible auditions that make viewers cringe have become a staple on the early episodes of So You Think You Can Dance and Murphy says she doesn’t mind them most of ht the time. “The really bad, you know, they're all so fun. They make me laugh,” she said. “The killer on the road is if you have to sit through four hours of mediocre.”

Each dancer who tries out for the show is always hoping for one sound: Mary Murphy’s high pitched, blood curdling scream. While the rest of us could do without it, the contestants constantly try to pull out all the stops to earn a shriek. Murphy told The Province what one would have to do to make Nigel and Mia reach for the earplugs. “Well, I think most of the time, usually, if I scream, it usually happens with a really fired-up number: sultry and sexy and hard-hitting and very dynamic, very dramatic. That usually gets me on my feet,” she admitted.

Making it to the Top 20 of So You Think You Can Dance is just the beginning for contestants. If they’re going to win, they may want to take the advice of a judge who really knows what she’s talking about. “They're going to have to have the technique; they're going to have to have the connection between partnerships; they're going to have to have great choreography,” she said of a dancer who could walk away with the grand prize. “They're going to have to have all that in alignment to really move us beyond saying, ‘Oh, well, that was amazing’.”